This invention relates to an arrangement of means for processing longitudinally-moving webs of material by cutting, coating, printing or the like and, more particularly, to treating webs of paper and board produced from an original one-piece web by dividing, preferably by longitudinally cutting the web for the subsequent treatment by an arrangement of apparatus for crosscutting the webs which are typically comprised of corrugated board.
Conventional machines for making corrugated board produce webs of board that are wider than the web of corrugated board required as the end product for making carton blanks. Cutting means are used to longitudinally divide the one-piece web of corrugated board into a number of parallel webs according to the width of the carton blank undergoing manufacture. Downstream in the production process, crosscutter means are provided to transversely cut the subwebs into portions of different length. In this way, carton blanks with different sizes can be made from a single web of corrugated board. Known crosscutter means take the form of rotary cutter rolls, flying shears, water-jet cutters, laser-beam cutters or the like.
Two crosscutter stations are generally used in known corrugated board-making machines so that two subwebs can be cut out transversely and independently of one another. The crosscutters are arranged either one above the other in the same transverse plane or one after the other at different heights with respect to the direction of movement of the web. West German Pat. No. 20 55 313 discloses a machine having two-crosscutters arranged one above the other. The crosscutters include rotary cutter rolls.
It has been proposed to arrange three crosscutters one after the other with the second and third crosscutters each disposed at a higher level than the preceding crosscutter so that it is possible to transversely cut three slit subwebs of different widths. It is a characteristic of the known arrangements of crosscutters in machines for making corrugated board that each individual crosscutter has a cutting length designed for the full width of the original web of material, although the subwebs which are severed thereby always have a much narrower width. Because of this design, the crosscutters cannot, as a rule, be used in an optimum manner in the known constructions because each individual crosscutter is so constructed and equipped in respect to its drive means that it can be used for cutting a web of material of the original width. The same inadequacies also occur with other means for processing longitudinally-moving webs of material, for example, coating, printing or similar means.